


A Room of One's Own

by mydogwatson



Series: The Postcard Tales [20]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: John-centric, M/M, Marriage, Retirement, The places he has lived
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-07
Updated: 2015-11-07
Packaged: 2018-04-30 12:31:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 770
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5163941
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mydogwatson/pseuds/mydogwatson
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>John has spent his life searching for a warm and cosy room.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Room of One's Own

**Author's Note:**

> Since I told Sherlock's side of things in The Buildings of England, I decided to give John equal time. Hope you approve.

1

It was the smallest room in the house [save the loo, of course] but Johnny was never bothered by that. After all, he was the smallest person in the family, so it only made sense. The walls badly needed painting, but it had been decades since anyone who’d lived here bothered to lift a brush. He did what he could to make it homey. Johnny carefully cut pictures from any magazines he could get his hands on and used cello tape to attach them to the grimy magnolia. He favoured pictures of cosy little rooms, with fireplaces and comfortable clutter. Occasionally his horrid sister Harry would come in and laugh at his gallery.

On the bad nights, Johnny would go into his closet, burrow into the old quilt he kept there, and try not to listen to the alcohol-fuelled sounds coming from the rest of the house. The shouting, the crying, the smashing of glass. He would hide his face in the quilt and think about a happy room in which he wouldn’t have to be afraid.

2

There was no privacy, of course. His patch in the barracks consisted of merely the cot, his trunk and about a meter of floor space. He didn’t mind so much. The area was easy to keep tidy and no one intruded. On the bad nights, when the sounds of war came too close, he would stretch out on the perfectly made cot and think about someplace else. Sometimes he even thought nostalgically about that bloody closet.

3

The room at Selly Oak was always crowded, as war casualties kept arriving. No one stayed very long in the bed next to John’s, so he never bothered to get to know any of the other patients. Sometimes they died. Sometimes they were discharged and left with a wife or mother or somebody else who cared enough to come. It was all the same to John. No one came for him. He spent his days staring at a calendar provided by the WI. Sometimes the picture was of a stately house or a flower-filled garden. His favourite, the one that was up when he was finally discharged, was of a country cottage with smoke curling from the chimney and a dog sitting by the door.

4

All the rooms in the veteran’s temporary housing facility were small. Small square boxes that held just the essentials. John did nothing to make his box any homier. The only thing in the room that comforted him at all was the gun kept carefully in the drawer.

5

His was the smaller of the two bedrooms in the Baker Street flat, but John wasn’t bothered at all by that. He kept it tidy and it was usually warm and just down the stairs was a cosy, clutter-filled sitting room with a cheerful fireplace. The most important thing, of course, was that he was not alone in the flat, because Sherlock was there. Sometimes he complained about the clutter, but he never really meant it.

And then Sherlock was gone and the only comfort was to be found in the memories that haunted the flat. He stayed in the smaller bedroom, even after Mrs Hudson suggested that he might want the other one. 

He did not move into the larger bedroom until a resurrected Sherlock kissed him with almost painful tenderness and asked him to.

6

The room was tucked up under the roof of the cottage and it was small and cluttered. There was no real fire, but Sherlock had gotten him a small electric one, so that was fine. He could sit up there and work on turning his decades of blog postings into actual books. There were pictures cello-taped to the freshly painted walls, mostly snaps of Sherlock and him torn from newspapers or magazines as well as a few more formal shots, including some framed and properly hung photographs from the wedding. There was usually a sleeping dog curled at his feet.

The best part of the room, though, was that when sitting at his desk in front of the window, he could watch Sherlock puttering amongst the hives below. Occasionally, his husband would look up, as if he knew John would be watching, and they would exchange a wave and a smile. Sherlock would usually make a gesture that meant he was ready for tea.

John would shake his head, close the laptop and go down the stairs to the kitchen to put the kettle on. Sometimes he lit the fire, even if it wasn’t cold enough to justify it, just because he could.

*

**Author's Note:**

> Title from: A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf


End file.
